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Success Stories - Broker Involvement Grant

Idaho Association of REALTORS®

North Idaho Summit:
The Idaho Association completed three Broker Summits in our East, West, and South Regions. These three Summits resulted in a major success for our ability to educate and engage both new and veteran brokers. At these summits the Idaho Association had a variety of presentations that focused on federal, state, and local issues aligned with the real estate industry.

Presentations include opening remarks from districts VP and State President, Broker issues with our Legal Counsel, Broker Involvement program overview and Broker calls for action with our NAR Broker Involvement Council Member, as well as Idaho and NAR Legislative and Regulatory Issues with our GAD. They focused on exploring the REALTOR^® Party and discussing the Vote, Act, Invest principles. Brokers are able to leave these summits with the tools they need to return to their office and continue the education process with their agents and the community. This grant helped us in being able to host a 4th summit in our Northern Region of the state.

Recruitment (i.e. # of brokers recruited): We set a goal of having at least 10% of all brokers from our Northern region attend. We invited roughly 180 brokers and had 30 attend which got us to about 16%. We will continue to set this goal higher as we continue our summits.
Retention (i.e. # of current participants invited and # attended):
What was so encouraging is that the brokers who attended raved about the program, being involved and signed up immediately for any programs such as the CFA Text program, while sitting in the room. They took materials, asked when we would hold more summits and said they planned to help recruit others that were not in attendance. Because of such a positive response, we feel that outside of regular electronic communication and semi annual events, it’s important to continue to hold the summits at least twice per year.
Engagement (i.e level of involvement before activity vs level of involvement now):
The messages revolved around a few key issues. First, we discussed data strategies as a state. Being that it's a hot topic for all, we made sure we had open and genuine conversations with our members. We then had a guest speaker for the event to discuss local economic growth with a university. We then had our Broker Council member speaking about broker involvement, the REALTOR^® Party and how to ensure that we were participating at high levels consistently. Finally, we wrapped up with our State Government Affairs Director, John Eaton speaking about local, state and national issues. We handed out REALTOR^® Party phone stickers, the round TEXT stickers, brochures, flyers and CDs about the REALTOR^® Party that were provided by NAR.
Education
i. What issue(s) were discussed?
The primary issues discussed were transportation, urban renewal districts, patent trolls and MID.
ii. Did the Brokers find value in the advocacy message?
They truly engaged and asked great questions, which appeared to show that they found value in the message.
iii. How will Brokers in your state and their agents be more involved as a result of this program?
We have a fairly high rate of brokers signed up for the CFA program, but we stressed making sure their agents vote, participate, sign up for the text program and work to speak to their local leaders.
iv. Did you survey the Brokers after your program/event? What type of feedback did you receive? Please share the survey with NAR.
We haven’t formally surveyed as of yet, but we received tons of verbal excitement, praise and requests for more of the summits.
v. Your proposal said Brokers will be able to take the information back to their individual offices for discussion with their agents. Do you know how they shared the advocacy information with their agents? We’ll continue to get this information as time goes on, but one way that we can see results is that our recent CFA that came out last week generated an over 20% response within only 5 days. Much faster than we’ve seen in the past.
vi. Have you followed up with Brokers since this program/event? How have you followed up with them and what have you learned? If not do you plan to follow up?
Outside of the conversations held at our Annual Conference, held last month, we have not yet formally followed up, but as part of our strategic plan, broker conversations are a priority and so our district VPs will continue to have conversations quarterly with our brokers, and we’ll continue to push the message about the REALTOR Party and its importance to our industry. We just passed our 2016 budget and the board overwhelmingly approved a line item to continue these summits as they saw so much value, so we intend to use these as a primary tool for increasing involvement in advocacy.